BBC3 Doctor Who Night

With just under a week to go to the new series of Doctor Who[1], BBC3[2] have been running a Doctor Who Night. This started at 7pm with a new Doctor Who Confidential, looking back at the glorious success of last year’s series and forward to this year’s new series starring David Tenant. There were enough clips to whet the appetite of fans without giving away too much. All nicely done, and enormous fun. Things that we have to look forward to are Queen Victoria, Cybermen, a werewolf, the return of Sarah Jane Smith and K9, Cybermen and much, much more. Oh, and did I mention Cybermen?

This was followed by a welcome rerun of The Christmas Invasion, which was at least as good the second time round[3]. David Tenant’s initial performance was just as good as I thought it was on Christmas Day, and I’m really looking forward to seeing how he plays the part over the next two years. Two years? Yup. The third series was commissioned last year, David is signed up for the series, and Billie Piper is so far confirmed to be “involved”. I’m hoping that means she’ll stay for at least the third series. The show reminded me of just what an incredible success this has been. It took the BBC finally deciding to bring back the show, the wonderful Julie Gardner (head of drama at BBC Wales and one of the Executive Producers of Doctor Who) to have the incredibly good sense to offer the series to the stunningly wonderful Russell T Davies, and above all RTD himself – a lifelong fan of the series[4] and one of the best TV writers of his generation to create a wonderfully 21st century take on the show that still remains true to its heart as a uniquely British creation. And things can only, as they say, get better from this point on. In addition to thirteen new episodes of Doctor Who, and another Christmas special, we’ll have spin-off series Torchwood starring John Barrowman reprising his excellent Captain Jack character.

The last part of the evening was a one hour “Story of Doctor Who” documentary first shown about three years ago, featuring contributions from the surviving Doctors, some of the companions, and various producers and writers, including Verity Lambert and Terrance Dicks. All good stuff. I particularly enjoyed the contributions from Tom Baker, who was my Doctor – the one who played the role when I was old enough to really follow what was going on and young enough to not really notice the occasional plot holes and effects weaknesses. He also stayed in the role for longer than anyone else, and has been heard to say that quitting was the biggest mistake he ever made.

And my copy of the long awaited Genesis of the Daleks DVD has been posted by those nice Amazon people, so I’ll have the chance to watch that before the new series starts. Look out for a DVD review here soon.

Watch out for more excited and borderline hysterical Doctor Who reports here, starting next Saturday!

[1] Which means I could do with a Tardis to skip forward a few days
[2] One of those new-fangled digital channels that hardly anyone watches most of the time, and which my cable provider seems to devote very little bandwidth to judging by the way the sound keeps popping and the image keeps freezing, mutter
[3] And for anyone who missed it again, you’ll be able to get it on the first DVD release of the new series. This will be a basic, extras-free release, probably out some time in May. Serious nutters may prefer to wait for the boxed set which will no doubt be out in time for Christmas
[4] As anyone who saw his Queer as Folk might have guessed